


blue blood, red blood, purple

by gooseberry



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Blind Character, F/M, Female Ignis Scientia, Friendship, Lesbian Character, Mildly Dubious Consent, Politically Motivated Pregnancy, implied infanticide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-06 21:35:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20513858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseberry/pseuds/gooseberry
Summary: She knows that Noct loves her, and sometimes she’s almost certain that Noct isinlove with her. Noct’s love for her—inher?withher?—is an overall positive. Ignis loves Noct, too, even if she’s notinlove with him—though there are times she thinks she might be. Sometimes she worries at it, turning the idea of Noct, and loving Noct, and being in lovewithNoct, over and over in her head until she feels nauseated.Is that—the nauseated turning-over of her stomach—what it feels like to be in love? When she thinks of what she could do with Noct, of what she would do with Noct if they decided to take their relationship beyond its few remaining limits, she feels sick. She likes women. She doesn’t like men. She shouldn’t like Noct, but she does. She really, really does, she just doesn’t know how.





	blue blood, red blood, purple

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lagerstatte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lagerstatte/gifts).

“Thanks, hon,” Cindy says cheerfully, taking the headlamps with her as she leaves. Ignis lets her eyes drift down to Cindy’s arse—her shorts are cut high enough that seeing the cheeks of her arse are unavoidable. Ignis lets herself look for a short, guilty-pleasure moment, then looks away. When she glances across the service station, she catches Noct watching her with a frown. 

Ignis feels herself flush, embarrassed to have been caught staring at Cindy’s arse, embarrassed at her own indiscretion, at Noct looking at her and unquestionably knowing exactly what Ignis was thinking and wanting and feeling. She looks away from Noct, too, focusing her attention on her phone as the easiest, and likely most obvious, out. 

She knows that Noct loves her, and sometimes she’s almost certain that Noct is _in_ love with her. Noct’s love for her—_in_ her? _with_ her?—is an overall positive. Ignis loves Noct, too, even if she’s not _in_ love with him—though there are times she thinks she might be. Sometimes she worries at it, turning the idea of Noct, and loving Noct, and being in love _with_ Noct, over and over in her head until she feels nauseated. 

Is that—the nauseated turning-over of her stomach—what it feels like to be in love? When she thinks of what she could do with Noct, of what she would do with Noct if they decided to take their relationship beyond its few remaining limits, she feels sick. She likes women. She doesn’t like men. She shouldn’t like Noct, but she does. She really, really does, she just doesn’t know how. 

Ignis has tried masturbating to Noct before, hot and sweaty and too nervous to actually climax, feeling dirty at the idea that she was masturbating to her best friend. Still, though—even other times, like when Ignis is thinking of beautiful, anonymous women, abstract in their attributes (breasts, arses, clits, pussies, mouths), ideas of Noct still come creeping into her head. His hand, hot and sweaty, in hers; the lower register of his voice; the flat and overall rectangular shape of his body, hard and rough and undeniably masculine. When she thinks of him—when thoughts of him creep into her head—it’s like being dunked in cold water, her insides shriveling up, tight and cold and uncertain.

It shouldn’t work, and it likely wouldn’t, if they were ever foolish enough to try—but she wants him. She wants him, every bit of him, because he’s hers and he’s been hers since they were children, and he should be hers until the end of their lives, or even until the end of the world. Until the end of everything. He should be _hers_.

x

Altissia is a terrifying and eye-opening clusterfuck all around, but the death of the Oracle brings home some hard truths Ignis had been content to ignore. Tenebrae has cadet lines; most of them are extinct, wiped out during Niflheim’s latest incursions, but there are at least two still existing lines that Ignis is aware of, and likely more. 

Lucis has no such luck. The last cadet branch went extinct nearly two hundred years ago, and there are no cousins, near or distant, to fall back upon. There have been too many generations of only children, and of secondary and tertiary children dying before they had children of their own. As of now, the line of the Lucis Caelum family comes to a single and finite point: Noct. 

“You need an heir,” she tells him bluntly the day after he’s woken up. She can hear Noct breathe, and swallow, and shift, all sounds that suggest his discomfort. She’s discomforted, too, though she tries to hide it, sitting with her feet flat on the floor and her hands lying flat in her lap. Flat flat flat, like her posture can be the surface of a pool of water, not so much calm as lifeless. 

“Luna’s dead,” Noct says at last, and Ignis can’t keep her hands from balling into fists; she forces them open, forces them flat on her lap.

“I know,” she says.

“And I’m not married,” Noct adds.

“I know,” she says again.

Noct’s laugh is short and strained, almost like a cough, and his voice is sounding—incredulous, maybe? She thinks it might be incredulousness that she’s hearing in his voice. It’s hard to tell when she can no longer see his face. “What do you expect me to do, then? Where am I gonna—” 

He cuts himself off with a sharp, odd-sounding gasp, and she listens to him breathe again, low and ragged breaths like he’s crying. She can’t fault him for it—she spent most of the time he was asleep crying, and she thinks she could cry more, if she had time for it. 

When his breathing has calmed down, growing lighter and more even, Ignis shifts in her chair, sitting forward. “Noct,” she says, looking in what she hopes is his direction, “you need an heir. _We_ need an heir.” 

It’s not surprising he understands her so quickly. They’ve lived in each other’s pockets for most of their lives, since they were little children, and sometimes—not always, but sometimes—it feels like they understand each other better than they understand themselves. Noct breathes in sharply, and there is a rustle, then the sound of—of what, springs? He must be standing up, then. Yes, he is, because now she can hear him begin to pace, his footsteps rushed and heavy. 

“What,” he asks, or maybe spits, his voice sounding angry, “with you?”

“Yes.”

“With you?” he asks again, no, she was wrong. He doesn’t sound angry; he sounds hurt and confused. “You’re not—you don’t even like guys.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she tells him. He scoffs at that, and she stands up from her chair, shuffling forward. Noct stops pacing, the sound of his footsteps falling away; at least that means he won’t crash into her as she’s stumbling around his room, trying to find him. She feels foolish and awkward, holding her hand out as she walks; she feels ungainly, the way she’s bracing herself to run into the bed with each step. She hates that he can see her like this, when she can’t see herself. She hates that she’s stumbling through this room blind, and that she’s stumbling through their lives blind, and that she’s tumbling through the clusterfuck of a post-Tenebrae, post-Lucis, post-Oracle world, blind as fuck all. 

Her knee bumps against something firm but squishy. She reaches lower with her hand, and when her hand finds soft fabric piled up, a firm surface beneath, the relief that washes over her is humiliating. The bed. She’s found the bed. She sits on it gingerly, not moving her hand until her arse is firmly planted, unable to shake the fear that the bed may move without her realizing it, that she’ll misjudge the distance, her position, the height or the breadth or whatever else. 

“I’ll do it for you,” she says, trying to inject as much force and assurance as she can into the words, trying to be certain in at least this. 

“But I don’t want to.” Noct’s voice is close—much closer than she’d expected. She didn’t hear him move—was she about to run into him before she ran into the bed? Would he have stopped her? Was he just watching her stumble around his room, making a fool of himself? “Ignis, I don’t want to.”

She has to swallow down the thick urge the cry before she can say, “We don’t have a choice, Noct.”

x

She had thought it’d be easier now that she’s blind, that by not seeing Noct she would manage to trick her body and her brain. She’s not wrong, not entirely. His cheeks are rougher than a woman’s, and his fingers feel wider, but those are small things, things that Ignis can try to push out of her mind. She fists her hands in his hair, and she focuses on his thumb in her pussy and his tongue on her clit. 

She can feel herself grow aroused, like a tiny flame that is slowly, painstakingly building. The rhythmic licks of Noct’s tongue fans the flame; the scratch of his patchy stubble nearly puts it out. Back and forth, on and off; she twists Noct’s hair in her hands, biting back a frustrated sob. There is a trickle between her legs. Noct’s spit? Or is it from her? 

It won’t get better than this, she realizes; or maybe she’s just admitting it to herself, coming to terms with how her arousal is less a blaze and more a guttering flame. Will a careless touch or a too heavy breath make it all worse? She lets go of Noct’s hair, reaching and grasping for his shoulders.

“It’s good enough,” she tells him, pulling at him. She feels him push up from between her thighs, her legs slipping from his shoulders. He breathes in like he’s preparing to say something, and her hands tighten on his arms. 

“It’s fine,” she says too quickly, trying to cut him off, uncertain what the sound of his voice will do to her. Noct breathes in again, but he doesn’t say anything, just shifts between her legs, drawing closer to her. She can feel his waist and his thighs between her legs, and the brush of his knuckles as he reaches down. Something else—hot and firm. His penis, undoubtedly. Her arousal is guttering, almost gone out. 

It hurts when he pushes into her, and from the way his breath punches out of him, she wonders if it hurts him, too, if she’s too tight, if she’s drying up too quickly. Her hands are growing numb, and she forces them to loosen from around Noct’s arms. When she lifts one of her hands to Noct’s head, or to where she thinks his head should be, it’s a clumsy motion; her hand bumps against Noct’s face—his jaw, she thinks, and then his ear. She cups her hand against Noct’s head, trying to pulls his head down close, though she’s not sure why. 

Maybe he has a better idea, or maybe he’s just as in the dark as she is. Either way, he lowers his head, leaning his forehead against her shoulder. His breath is growing ragged, and it’s hot and humid against her skin. She can feel her skin prickle across her left shoulder and armpit, over her breast, and she moves her hand from Noct’s head to her chest. She wants to touch herself. She wants to cry. 

When he groans, it’s a low, reverberating sound, and Ignis can feel her body grow tight and cold with disgust. Noct has grabbed onto her, his hands clutching her shoulders, and his fingers tighten when Ignis’s body begins to grow stiff. This has to be as awful for him as it is for her. She wonders, if she weren’t blind, if she’d see tears in his eyes. Her chest feels wet beneath his face, and with how cool Noct’s skin seems to be, it’d be laughable to think it’s sweat on his face. 

“I love you,” she admits, blurting it out as she pats at him, feeling her way to his shoulder and neck. She throws an arm around his back, then makes herself lift her legs, too. Her hips feel heavy as lead and concrete, and her right knee slips the first time she tries to hook her legs around his waist. She tries again, and succeeds this time; the changes her posture, turning her pelvis upwards, and it feels like he sinks farther into her. Deeper into her. She wants them to be done with this. 

“Specs,” Noct says, his voice cracking and thick. She wraps herself around him tighter, her legs and her arms, wishing she could pull him into herself some other way. Her eye is burning. 

“I love you,” she tells him, hearing her own voice crack. “I love you more than anything in the world, and I always will.”

x

Noct is gone within a month, lost to the Crystal. Ignis lets Gladio and Prompto lead her out of Gralea and out of Niflheim, their hands big and rough and cold. Hers are the same, in all the ways that matter: rough and cold, and feeling empty without Noct here beside her. 

“What now?” Gladio asks when they’ve reached Lestallum a couple months later. It’s been a long, tiring journey, zigzagging their way across Niflheim, then across the western regions of Lucis. Their route has been a succession of towns and villages, each broadcast by Hunter HQ. What help they’ve been able to offer the towns hasn’t been much, like a bandaid slapped on a severed limb. They’re too worn-down and tired; they’re too demoralized. They’re floundering, lost without Noct. _She’s_ lost without Noct. 

“We do what we can,” she says, “and we wait for Noct.” 

Gladio sighs heavily from the other side of the table, and Ignis lifts her hands from the table, pulling them into her lap. Gladio, she knows, is the sort of person who can’t hold still; he’s impatient by nature, needing to move and to act, always needing to _do_ in response to the world around him. Prompto is much the same, though he’s not as extreme. Too much time, too, too much waiting, will only make him antsier, until he’s nearly vibrating out of their skin. Both of them will want to go and to do, to busy themselves with physical labor, most likely daemon hunting.

She won’t be able to go with them. She’s already cut things close at it is—she began leaving her shirt untucked weeks ago, and she’s using a hair tie to fasten her trousers. It speaks to all of their frazzled, exhausted brains, and to the lessening daylight, that neither Gladio nor Prompto have noticed the state of her. She won’t be able to hide things for much longer, and even if that weren’t an issue, it’s too risky for her to go traipsing around in the wilderness, in the dark, without knowing when or how she’ll get back to civilization and proper, if a bit shabby, healthcare. 

“We should take a few days, get rested and resupplied,” Gladio is saying. “We can head back out at the end of the week—”

“I won’t be going with you,” Ignis interrupts him. There is a clatter to her side—Prompto’s chair legs coming back down to the floor. 

“What? Iggy—”

“I’m pregnant.” She clears her throat, an affectation from the Privy Council that she’s never managed to rid herself of, no matter how her uncle had scolded her. “It’s Noct’s, of course.”

“Preg— But I thought,” Prompto says, his voice going high and strained, sounding confused, “that you were— I mean—” 

“Lady Lunafreya’s passing,” she tries to say delicately, obliquely, “brought to my attention the riskiness of our situation. Tenebrae’s, of course, but especially Lucis’s. It’s not my place to criticize my betters, but Noct being an only child should never have been allowed. Lucis needs heirs. Noct needs heirs.”

There’s a quiet _thumpf_ across the table. Gladio breathes in, the sound harsh and whistling; after a few seconds, he breathes out again, another heavy sigh. “Right. We need to talk about this, figure out what our plan is.”

Ignis smiles; it feels tight and thin on her face, and it pulls at her scars, makes her face ache. “We do.”

x

There are other things, all of them easier not to tell: how the world had been knocked from beneath her when she’d touched Pryna’s fur, and how an older and wearier Noct had left her even more staggered; how she can still see the image of Noct impaled on the throne, like it was burned into her brain while her eyes were burned out; how Ardyn had laid his hand, palm open and fingers spread, against her stomach. 

No plans can ever remain intact, not after they’ve come in contact with the enemy. If life is a game, it’s one in constant flux, and they are all the pieces coming on and going off the board. Noct is the Astrals’ gambit, plucked off the board and held suspended in some ghostly fingers, held in waiting until Bahamut puts him back into play. 

Ignis can be her own gambit, though; her body, her womb, the child inside of it. She can carry Lucian blood as well as any other woman. _Better_ than any other woman. She will love the piece of Noct that she’s hiding in her body; she’ll break her heart for it, and use every fragment to build it up. She’ll love it and love it and _love_ it, like she’s loved almost no one else, and when it’s her turn, she’ll swap it on the board. Pawn for king. A piece of Noct for all of Noct. 

There’s a feeling like butterflies in her stomach, like breathless anticipation; it’s the baby moving, she thinks, stretching and turning over, its motions tiny and delicate and helpless. She rests her hand on her stomach, her palm lying over the place the butterfly-wing feeling was, and she closes her eyes, waiting to feel it move again.


End file.
